By Bob Brown
The towns of Parachute and Steamboat Springs, both founded in the early 1900s, lie 96 miles apart in northwestern Colorado.
While similar in age and location,“ they couldn’ t be further apart in terms of economics,” said Travis Elliott, Parachute’ s Town manager.
Steamboat Springs, a thriving community of 13,500 residents, is renowned as a winter tourist destination offering geothermal hot springs and world-class skiing.
Parachute, on the other hand, is a working-class community of 1,400, with another 7,000 people living in the surrounding area. It’ s an area that boomed economically when the Colony Oil Shale Project opened in 1964 but went bust when Exxon closed the project on May 2, 1982, a date still referred to by locals as“ Black Sunday.”
Ayres, through its Colorado-based landscape architecture team, has been integral in recent efforts by each of these strikingly different communities to revitalize their downtowns.
Civic Plaza an instrumental project
Last summer, Steamboat Springs opened its new downtown Civic Plaza, a project for which Ayres played an instrumental role. Working closely with Town staff, the Ayres landscape architecture team developed several concepts, engaged with the community to get design input, developed engineering and bidding documents, and oversaw construction and implementation.
Civic Plaza sits on a site previously occupied by 10th Street between Oak Street and the alley to the south. Today, the plaza merges Centennial Hall into a complex that also features a new threestory City Hall and a new three-bay fire station.
“ This area has had a civic and municipal presence since the founding of the town( in 1900), and our new Civic Plaza has the potential to highlight that historical significance,” said Tom Leeson, Steamboat Springs’ deputy city manager.
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